Stocked up: Alewife health spawns salmon boost

Sep. 18—TRAVERSE CITY — Chinook salmon fishing in Grand Traverse Bay this summer is the best in Brady Anderson's nine years as captain of Storm Hawk Sport Fishing, he said.

So he's excited to hear about the Michigan Department of Natural Resources' plans to increase stocking levels in Lake Michigan of the popular Pacific salmon.

"I think it's a great thing, I mean it's a good thing for all anglers, from the charter customers to just the recreational guys," he said. "The baitfish population has been really healthy the last couple years, it seems like we've been seeing a lot of it out in the lake."

Alewives in particular are coming back from a precipitous decline, and the return of chinook salmon's favorite food is behind the DNR's planned stocking increase, according to the agency.

Putting more of the Pacific salmon in the lake — up to 1 million spring fingerlings from the current 650,000, according to the DNR — is an idea that many anglers support, said Jay Wesley, the department's Lake Michigan basin coordinator.

"The only controversy I see is how many go to what ports, because everyone wants their port stocked," he said.

Charlevoix, Traverse City and other northern locales will get more chinook salmon each spring if DNR Fisheries Chief Jim Dexter approves the plan, Wesley said. That decision could come in the next few weeks as fisheries technicians get ready for the fall spawning run, and the egg take from those salmon to replenish state fish hatcheries.

The DNR will host a virtual meeting Monday at 7 p.m. to hear public input on the proposed increase.

Port-to-port

So far, plans are to plant 125,000 chinooks in Charlevoix every year, instead of roughly 90,000 every other year, Wesley said. The Boardman River, also known as the Ottaway, will get boosted to 100,000 every other year, up from around 75,000 at the same interval.

Chinooks could also be headed for two locations it had dropped after drastic cuts to stocking levels in past years, Wesley said. Ludington State Park is one, as is Fairport. The small town at the southern tip of Garden Peninsula is near the nutrient-rich waters coming out of Green Bay.

Bill Winowiecki, Michigan Charter Boat Association president and captain of Watta Bite Charter Fishing, said he's looking forward to seeing more chinooks stocked at Medusa Creek near Charlevoix, since those fish tend to wander along the coast.

"I personally have been pushing very hard for the Medusa Creek plant, because it gives everybody a chance to catch fish," he said.

Dale Ealy is captain of Ultimate Charters in Elk Rapids, and said he's hoping some of those salmon make their way down to East Grand Bay. He's seen plenty of ups and downs in the lake's stocked salmon fishery in his 42 years of fishing.

Gone are the days when Ealy and others in East Grand Traverse Bay could haul in four to six salmon a day, he said.

"Now, if you go out and get one you'll be lucky," he said.

Ealy wondered if more chinooks stocked at Charlevoix would end up in West Grand Traverse Bay, where salmon head on their way to the Boardman/Ottaway River.

Wesley agreed that Charlevoix is an important stocking site for anglers around northern Lake Michigan. As they mature, they'll mix around the lake and head to points farther south.

"So we hear that not only do people in Ludington get a shot at them, but they pass through Manistee and Arcadia, Frankfort — so everyone gets a chance as those fish move north to Medusa Creek," he said.

Fairport offers a similar perk, Wesley said. There's no creek there, so chinooks planted there tend to wander up various Upper Peninsula streams once they mature.

Most chinooks return to the place they were planted between ages 2 and 3, Wesley said.

Known as king salmon, the fish are prized for their fighting strength, according to the DNR. They have silvery sides and black spots on their backs.

The state record is 45 pounds although most weigh in at 20 or less — a king caught off Wisconsin in August weighing 40.4 pounds is believed to be the heaviest chinook caught in the state's waters since 1994, the year the record-holder was caught, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported.

By the truckload

Raising more chinook salmon to meet the increased demand won't be an issue, said Ed Eisch, who manages the DNR's fish production program. For one, the same hatcheries used to raise many more.

For another, chinook salmon take a lot less time to complete a process known as smolting, a series of physical changes as they prepare to leave their spawning streams. While coho salmon spend a year in their natal stream and leave when they're 16 to 18 months old, chinooks migrate at about the 6-month mark.

"That actually makes them a much less expensive fish to rear in the hatchery, because we only have to hang on to them for less than a year," he said.

The biggest cost increases will be fish food, and the transport expenses of trucking fingerlings to stocking sites, Eisch said, especially as diesel prices linger above $5 a gallon.

Minimizing transport costs means raising the fish as close to stocking sites as possible, Eisch said. Thompson, Wolf Lake and Platte River hatcheries currently produce chinook salmon. Which hatcheries will meet the increased demand depends on where the fingerlings are needed.

Obligations between the state and five Indigenous tribes — Bay Mills Indian Community, Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians, Little River Band of Ottawa Indians, Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians and Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians — that signed the Treaty of 1836 also impact the stocking decisions, Wesley said. A biologist with the Chippewa Ottawa Resource Authority had input on the stocking numbers for sites that fall within the treaty waters.

Picky eaters

The fate of chinook salmon, stocked in the Great Lakes since 1967, closely tracks another species that found its way to the lakes with human help.

Chinook salmon eat alewives almost exclusively, Wesley said — the small, silvery baitfish that made its way up the Welland Canal in the 1920s.

Other species are less selective, including coho salmon, another Pacific salmonid. Lake trout, the lake's biggest native predator, are generalists so they'll eat all sorts of smaller prey.

States around Lake Michigan cut salmon stocking numbers as alewife numbers tumbled, Wesley said. Michigan hatcheries went from sending out 3 million chinook fingerlings in the 1990s to 330,000 in 2016.

Bumping up the stocking rate to 1 million would be the first time the state planted that many chinooks since 2013, Wesley said.

At play is another invasive species, the quagga and zebra mussels that filter out the plankton so critical to the lakes' food webs, Wesley said. As the bottom of the food web disappeared, so did the alewives, plummeting from more than an estimated 700 kilotons in the 1970s to about 50 kilotons in 2015.

Alewife numbers have bounced back somewhat, up to around 100 kilotons, Wesley said.

"So it has increased, but we're nowhere near where historically it was," he said.

Alewife tale

Alewife numbers are climbing as productivity rebounds in nearshore areas, Wesley said. Yet another invasive species, the round goby, eats the mussels that otherwise would filter out the plankton. In some spots the small bottom-feeding fish have all but eliminated the mussels.

That's not the case offshore, where there are fewer gobies.

More nutrients in nearshore waters, combined with salmon stocking reductions, helped alewives recover, Wesley said.

"I think year after year of stocking reductions over time allowed (alewives) to get to a point where they had a little bit better survival," he said. "So to get some older alewives into the system, then their productivity potential does increase a little bit."

Winowiecki was among the many to notice dead alewives littering Lake Michigan shorelines this spring. It left him wondering if the DNR could have upped its stocking levels even sooner.

Wild ones

He also noticed a lot of young fish with all their fins intact, meaning they're wild-born and not from a hatchery. Winowiecki typically starts from Glen Arbor and said there are plenty near the Manitou Islands.

"Which streams they come from, I have no idea, but I know we've caught off the Manitous this year a lot of young fish," he said.

Wesley said biologists figure about 4.5 million wild chinooks come from Michigan streams. That has plateaued over the last five years but still surpasses what biologists figured. Kings went from entirely stocked with little reproductive success to about 80 percent wild by the mid-2000s.

Those wild fish are an important factor in any stocking decision. They eat alewives, too, and their numbers can be hard to predict. If their numbers climb, alewife populations could fall.

That would prompt the DNR to scale back stocking efforts again to try to rebalance predator-prey numbers.

"We're hoping anglers know this now, that we're just going to have to adjust up and down, because it is a delicate balance now, and hopefully they'll trust us that if we do reduce stocking, when things are good we'll increase it," Wesley said.

Lake trout

More king salmon in Lake Michigan could be good for lake trout, Wesley said. For one, more competition for alewives could have them eating more of their other prey — other baitfish like smelt, bloater chub and round gobies.

That's important because alewives contain an enzyme that keeps lake trout eggs from hatching.

Winowiecki said he figures having more salmon to target will take some angling pressure off lake trout, and Wesley agreed.

Hauling in a lake trout has its own appeal — Ealy said those and ciscoes make up most of the catch on his trips, and Winowiecki said targeting trout gets his clients through the months before salmon start biting.

"That 10-year-old kid may not be able to handle 20 pounds of salmon but he can sure handle a 10-pound lake trout, and that'll make his day, I can tell you that," Winowiecki said.